Which brands did UK consumers rate as the best for customer experience? The highest score went to Amazon, with a Customer Experience Index (CXi) score of 81. Five more retailers — Marks & Spencer, John Lewis, Debenhams, Next, and Boots — scored 75 or more, which is Forrester’s threshold for a customer experience to be considered “good.” It's evident that retailers are doing a better job, on average, of meeting their customers' expectations than the other industries that online consumers rated in this study — airlines, banks, electronics manufacturers, hotels, retailers, and TV service providers.

Among bank brands, Halifax was the top performer with a CXi score of 70, fully 13 points ahead of the lowest bank in the index — Santander, with a score of just 57. Bringing up the rear in Forrester’s index were TV service providers and mobile telecommunications providers — Virgin Media, BT (TV Service), Vodafone, and Orange all had “very poor” CXi scores of less than 55.

If you’re familiar with the Customer Experience Index that Forrester has conducted annually in the US since 2007, you will know that this research provides allows us to compare the experience at leading companies — as rated by their customers. We achieve this by asking customers if their experiences with leading brands met their needs, were easy, and were enjoyable:

Calling all interactive design agencies in the US and Canada! I'm writing the update to Forrester's "Interactive Design Agency Overview, 2012" report, and I need your help to do it. Please complete our survey by following this link.

If you would like your agency to be featured in the research, please complete the survey to share details of your agency's size, capabilities, industry strengths, and so on. If you would like to see a preview of the questions in the survey, you can download a copy of the survey instrument here.

The deadline for completing the survey is November 27. Please spread the word among interactive design agencies — I hope to include as many agencies as possible in the report this year.

Those were the words of an airline employee in Pittsburgh, following the cancellation of my flight to Washington, D.C. The agent had put me onto the next available flight. There was nothing more to do about the situation, and my questions were a waste of her time. The pressure on me to accept my fate and let her go home could hardly have been less subtle.

Most of us would like to think that we’re more customer-centric than that individual. However, unless we check the self-centered tendencies of our organizations, we run the risk of being every bit as difficult to deal with — expecting customers to adapt to our language, practices, and policies. That won’t cut it anymore because customers have plenty of options. Companies that want to thrive today had better understand how to meet or exceed their customers' expectations throughout their journeys.

That’s where customer journey maps come in. These tools are proving their value to companies that want to improve customer experience. When they’re used in strategic discussions, training exercises, and design practices, they help stakeholders throughout the organization to keep in mind the processes, needs, and perceptions of customers who are trying to achieve their goals. In my recent research on "Tools For Mastering The Customer Experience Ecosystem," I explained how the packaged vacation firm, TUI, used journey maps to plan for the future of vacationers' end-to-end experiences and how a logistics firm used journey maps to improve customers' experience with its parcel tracking service.

After moving to a new apartment in September, I needed to get a new TV. My first instinct was to gather information from a few sources. I browsed online retailers to get an idea of prices, and I looked at manufacturers’ marketing content to understand the latest technologies like 3D TV. After all of that, I turned to consumer reviews and discussions to get a feeling for whether I would actually find those features valuable. (For example, some customer reviews helped me confirm that I didn’t want 3D TV.)

Where did I find those reviews? Everywhere — there are star ratings and comments on product pages at retail sites (like John Lewis and Amazon.com), technology media sites (like CNET) and manufacturer websites. Interestingly — I got the feeling that the manufacturers still aren’t entirely comfortable with the transparency that social media brings. They’d like to put a spin on the message, even if they can’t entirely control it — For example, Panasonic’s UK site has a page that promotes “5 Star Reviews Of The Month” (see the screenshot below). I can't think of a situation when I'd want a firm to guide me only to the most positive reviews of its products. Can you?

I'm excited that I'll be spending time with Forrester clients next week at Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum 2012 East. On the second day of the forum (Wednesday, June 27th), there are two industry presentations of particular interest to healthcare industry executives:

Once again, I'm going to write an overview of the European interactive design agency market to help Forrester clients identify design agencies to help them with their projects in Europe. The report title will be "2012: Where To Get Help For Interactive Design Projects In Europe." Participants will receive a copy of the research and their details will be included in the report.

I would like to invite interactive design agencies in Europe to participate. Please complete the agency survey at the following location:

The survey is designed to gather data from European firms that have significant experience in designing and developing digital experiences (web, mobile, etc.). Survey questions cover interactive agency size, practice areas, industry expertise, locations, and a range of costs for typical engagements. If you know any agencies that should be included in my report, please forward the survey link to them or show them this blog post.

Thank you!

P.S. If you want a preview of the survey, you can see all the questions on the following site:

"Where to get help for interactive design projects in Europe?" That's the question I want to answer for customer experience professionals in my next research. To do that, I'm inviting all interactive design agencies in Europe to help me. Would you like to be included in a report that will help Forrester clients with their interactive agency selection process? If the answer is yes, please complete this 15-minute survey at:

The survey is designed to gather data from European firms that have significant experience in designing and developing digital experiences (web, mobile, etc.). Survey questions cover interactive agency size, practice areas, industry expertise, locations, and a range of costs for typical engagements. If you know any agencies that should be included in my report, please forward the survey link to them or show them this blog post.

If you have questions, please send me an email: jbrowne at forrester dot com.

[16/Feb/2011]: Some people asked to see the questions before going through the survey online. That's a fair request, so I've uploaded a PDF of the survey to this page:

I'm pleased to announce that "The Forrester Wave™: UK Interactive Agencies — Web Design Capabilities, Q1 2010", is now available to Forrester clients on the Forrester Web site.

This report is an evaluation of the Web design capabilities of leading UK design agencies: AKQA, Amaze, Detica, EMC Consulting, LBi, Reading Room, Sapient Interactive, VML London, and Wunderman. Putting this together took six months of effort by a hard-working team that included Harley Manning, Angela Beckers, Richard Gans, William Chu and Shelby Catino.

In our research, we found that Detica and Sapient Interactive led the pack for transaction-led projects, due in large part to the high usability scores earned by the client reference sites they provided for evaluation. AKQA, EMC Consulting, LBi, Reading Room, and Wunderman were Strong Performers for transaction-led projects, with AKQA's exemplary Brand Image Review scores moving it into the Leaders' circle for image-led projects. Rounding out the field, Amaze showed strength in multilingual projects and image-led projects, while VML London earned top scores from both reference clients for the business results it produced. Both agencies came in as Contenders.

All nine vendors in this report have significant market presence and capabilities to service large clients. They are all ranked in the top 25 UK agencies by fee revenue (using data published by New Media Age).

What sets the Wave apart from other industry rankings and awards is the transparent, fact-based evaluation that underpins it. Forrester clients have the ability to look at detailed vendor scorecards and see what the strengths and weaknesses of each agency are.

To gather information on the strength of each vendor's current offering (represented on the vertical axis) and strategy (represented on the horizontal axis), we used the following methods:

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About ten years ago, when Forrester was writing some of our early research on effective Web design, we noticed a pattern among leading companies. They told us they were finding it very helpful to use design personas - models of customers based on qualitative research into real customers, but presented as vivid stories about individuals (not segment descriptions). These tools enabled them to stay focused on the needs of their most important customers when designing online experiences.

Since then, design personas have become fairly mainstream design tools in North American companies, and increasingly common in Europe and Japan - not only for Web design, but across all channels. However, the quality of personas varies enormously from company to company. For example, I'm evaluating personas from UK interactive agencies at the moment and although some are clearly well researched, engaging, helpful to designers and believable, others seem to be mere stereotypes.

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I'm embarrassed to see that we haven't updated our blog in three weeks. I guess it's a time of year when it's hard to stay on top of some things. I found myself exhausted at the end of June. (In addition to my trip to NYC for the CXP forum, I also had to do some business travel in Europe). Perhaps you've been feeling the same way? At the start of July, I took a holiday. It was sorely needed.

I visited Lisbon, which, it turns out, is a very beautiful city with great food and wine. As with all travel, the trip gave me a lot of experiences to think about, including a couple of incidents when I needed to ask people to fix things that had "gone wrong":